To Serve Them All My Days

Copyright © 1972 by R.F. Delderfield. Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate.

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1972.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delderfield, R. F. (Ronald Frederick)

To serve them all my days / R.F. Delderfield.

p. cm.

1. School principals--Fiction. 2. Boarding schools--Fiction. 3. Married people--Fiction. 4. England--Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PR6007.E36T6 2009

823’.912--dc22

2008036692

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Qualified Disclaimer

Part One: Initiate

One

Two

Three

Part Two: Catalyst in a Beret

One

Two

Three

Four

Part Three: The Bell in the Brain

One

Two

Three

Four

Part Four: Ave Et Cave

One

Two

Part Five: Impasse

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part Six: Cut and Come Again

One

Two

Three

Four

Part Seven: Island in a Torrent

One

Two

Three

Part Eight: Plenitude

One

Two

Three

Part Nine: Re-Run

One

Two

Three

Reading Group Guide

About the Author

Back Cover

Dedicated to my friend and colleague

of the book world

—Robin Denniston

A Qualified Disclaimer

Almost every writer of fiction inserts the obligatory disclaimer in his work and some, I suspect, do it with tongue in cheek. The truth is, of course, no one ever invented anyone. Every character in fiction is an amalgam of factors drawn from the author’s memory and imagination and this is particularly true of To Serve Them All My Days. No character here is a true portrait, or caricature, of any master or boy I ever encountered at my six schools and one commercial college, between 1917 and 1929, but aspects of people I met are embodied in all of them, and I have even used nicknames I recalled, as well as several scholastic backgrounds. To write fiction in any other way would be to divorce oneself from reality and what kind of book would emerge from that? In using, say, an average of six schoolmasters and six boys for every one between these pages, I intended no slight or criticism, only to portray life at school as I saw it up to 1940, when I had entered my twenty-ninth year. I was glad to leave five of the six schools but there is one I still regard with the greatest affection. I leave it to the reader to sort the wheat from the chaff.

R.F.D.

February 1971

Part One

Initiate

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!

My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.

—John Milton

One

1

The guard at Exeter warned him he would have to change at Dulverton to pick up the westbound train to Bamfylde Bridge Halt, the nearest railhead to the school, but did not add that the wait between trains was an hour. It was one of those trivial circumstances that played a part in the healing process of the years ahead, for the interval on that deserted platform, set down in a rural wilderness, and buttressed by heavily timbered hills where spring lay in ambush, gave Powlett-Jones an opportunity to focus his thoughts in a way he had been unable to do for months, since the moment he had emerged from the dugout and paused, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to glance left and right down the trench.

From that moment, down long vistas of tortured, fearful and horribly confused dreams, his thoughts, if they could be recognised as thoughts, had been random pieces of a child’s jigsaw, no two dovetailing, no half-handful forming a coherent pattern. Yet now, for a reason he could not divine, they coalesced and he was aware, on this account alone, of a hint of reprieve.

***

The shell, a coal-box, must have pitched directly on the parados of the nearest traverse, filling the air with screaming metal and raising a huge, spouting column of liquid mud. He had no real awareness of being flung backwards down the slippery steps, only a blessed certainty that this was it. Finish. Kaput. The end of three years of half-life, beginning that grey, October dawn in 1914, when his draft had moved up through a maze of shallow ditches to a waterlogged sector held by the hard-pressed Warwickshires they were relieving. Even then, after no more than two days in France, his sense of geography had been obliterated by desolation, by acres and acres of debris scattered by the sway of two battle-locked armies across the reeking mudflats of Picardy. There were no landmarks and not as many guidelines as later, when trench warfare became more sophisticated. The confusion, however, enlarged its grip on his mind as months and years went by, a sense of timelessness punctuated by moments of terror and unspeakable disgust, by long stretches of yammering boredom relieved by two brief respites, one in base hospital, recovering from a wound, the other when he was withdrawn for his commissioning course. Superiors, equals and underlings came and went. Thousands of khaki blurs, only a very few remaining long enough to make a lasting impression on him. Here and there he had made a friend, the kind of friend one read about in the classics, true, loyal, infinitely relished. But the mutter of the guns, the sour mists that seemed to hang over the battlefield in summer and winter, had swallowed them up as the wheels of war trundled him along, a chance survivor of a series of appalling shipwrecks.

Occasionally, just occasionally, he would be aware of conventional time. The coming of a new season. A birthday or anniversary, when his memory might be jogged by a letter from home, full of mining-village trivia. But then the fog would close in again and home and the past seemed separated from him by thousands of miles and millions of years, a brief, abstract glimpse of links with a civilisation as dead as Nineveh’s.

And at the very end of it all that ultimate mortar shell, landing square on the parados and pitchforking him over the threshold of hell where, for the most part, he was unaware of his identity as a man or even a thing but floated free on a current of repetitive routines – shifts on a stretcher or in a jolting vehicle; daily dressings, carried out by faceless men and women; odd, unrelated sounds like bells and the beat of train wheels; the rumble of voices talking a language he never understood; the occasional, sustained yell that might have signified anger, pain or even animal high spirits.

The intervals of clarity and cohesion lengthened as time went on, but they were never long enough for him to get a firm grip on his senses. He learned, over the months, that he had been dug out alive, the only survivor of the blast, after being buried for several hours. Also that he had survived, God alone knew how, the long, jolting journey down the communication trenches to the dressing station, to advance base and finally to Le Havre and the hospital ferry. For a long time, however, he was unaware of being back in England, shunted from one hospital to another until he finally came to rest at Osborne, reckoned a convalescent among a thousand or more other shattered men as confused as himself.

Then, but very slowly, he became fully aware of himself again. Second Lieutenant David Powlett-Jones, A Company, Third Battalion, South Wales Borderers; sometime Davy Powlett-Jones, son of Ewart and Glynnis, of No. 17 Aberglaslyn Terrace, Pontnewydd, Monmouthshire, a boy who had dreamed of scholarship and celebrity, of bringing a gleam of triumph into the eyes of a short, stocky miner who had worked all his life in a hole in the mountain and died there with two of his sons in the Pontnewydd-Powis explosion of August, 1913.

He was aware of his identity and, to some extent, of his past and present, but the future was something else. He could never attach his mind to it for more than a few seconds. The war surely would go on for ever and ever, until every human soul in the world was engulfed in it. He could never picture himself leading any different kind of life but that of trudging to and from the line, in and out of the mutter of small-arms fire and the sombre orchestra of the shells. Hospital life, as he lived it now, was no more than an interval.

Then Rugeley-Scott, the neurologist, infiltrated into his dream world. First as a white-smocked and insubstantial figure, no different from scores of predecessors who had paused, hummed and prodded during the last few months, but ultimately as a force where he could find not comfort exactly but at least relevance. For Rugeley-Scott had certain theories and persisted in putting them forward.

One was his theory of upland air and David’s own Celtic roots responded to this, feeding a little vitality into the husk of his flesh and bone. For Rugeley-Scott said that a man could enjoy a sense of proportion in upland air that was denied the Lowlander, upland air being keen and stimulating and capable of clearing the fog in the brain and reanimating petrified thought-processes. It had a trick, he said, of making a man at one with his environment. Rugeley-Scott, of course, was a Highlander, whose boyhood had been spent in Sutherland and whose medical studies had taken him no further south than Perthshire. He believed passionately in upland air in the way a primitive savage believes in the witch doctor’s bones and amulets.

Rugeley-Scott’s second theory grew out of the first, close involvement in a small, tightly knit community, where a personality was encouraged to flower as it could never flower in a city. It was concerned, also, with a specific purpose, enshrined in an ideal of some kind. In a creed, perhaps, or a crusade. In one or other of the arts that yielded an end product. Above all, in involvement with others but not too many others. A hundred or so, collectively breathing upland air.

David never afterwards recalled how these theories came to centre on the profession of schoolmaster, imparting to successive generations of the young such knowledge as a man accumulated through books, experience, contemplation. Yet somewhere along the line, in the first weeks of 1918, this concentration occurred, so that David Powlett-Jones, white hope of the Pontnewydd Elementary School, the miner’s son who had won the first local scholarship to the Grammar School at thirteen, and had gone on to win another for university four years later, began to see himself, a little fancifully, as an usher on a rostrum, writing on a blackboard in front of an audience of boys.

It was no more than a silhouette at first but Rugeley-Scott, with Celtic obstinacy, persisted until a comprehensive picture emerged. And after that, a train of minor events was fired that involved letters and telephone calls, so that at length, on a still afternoon in early March, seven months after the coal-box had exploded below Pilckhem Wood, David Powlett-Jones found himself sitting on a paint-scarred seat on Dulverton Station, wondering who had dumped a rail junction in such an isolated spot. He wondered too how long he would have to order his thoughts before he boarded a train for a place he had never heard of before Rugeley-Scott gave him the envelope containing particulars for his interview with the Reverend Algernon Herries, Headmaster of Bamfylde School, Devon.

He thought then, with a mixture of bitterness and humility, ‘But what the hell am I doing here anyway? What headmaster in his senses would engage a wreck like me, who jumps a foot in the air every time a door bangs? That chap Herries, whoever he is, will take one look at me and show me the door, tut-tutting all the way to the motor, providing they have motors out here.’

He then drew three deep breaths of upland air and despite the memory of the ward’s wry jokes about it, found that it did have a noticeable effect upon his powers of concentration. At least it enabled him to evaluate the view of those hanging woods, part evergreen, part the skeletal branches of older, heavier timber, and remark on the astounding quietude of the little station. Quiet was something he had forgotten about, along with so many other things that belonged to his childhood and boyhood. Never once, not even on the blackest night in Flanders, had it been as quiet as this. Always there had been the scrape and shuffle of working parties, the plash of signallers slipping in flooded trenches, cursing at every traverse. And in the background, always, the guns had growled north or south of the sector, a thunderstorm roaming between Switzerland and the sea.

Here you could almost reach out and touch the quiet. It was a living thing that seemed to catch its breath up there in the hanging woods and then, at a wordless command, slip down the long hillside and gust over the rails to lose itself in the wood opposite. Its touch was gentle and healing, passing over his scar tissue like the fingers of a woman. He wanted to embrace it, press it into himself, swallow it, lose himself in it. And all the time the white clouds overhead kept pace with it, moving in massive formation across the blue band above the valley and the breeze smelled of resin and bracken and all manner of clean, washed, living things. No whiff of putrefaction here. And no hint of gas.

He surrendered to its benediction, and was sound asleep when the walrus-moustached stationmaster found him, studying him with the compassionate detachment of a sixty-year-old who had seen the passage of a thousand troop-trains. The long, slightly saturnine face was Celtic, one of the darker, taller, heavy-browed Celts who had little in common with West Countrymen this side of the Tamar. The limbs, relaxed now, seemed shrunken under the khaki gaberdine, the body pulled in by the worn Sam Browne belt. The face was that of a boy prematurely aged, with hollowed cheeks accentuated by deepset eyes and high cheekbones. The skin was tanned, but below the tan there was a hint of pallor. The railwayman muttered, ‘Osspittle. Somewhere up the line,’ and was tempted to let him sleep on but then, recollecting his duty, he shook him by the shoulder and said, ‘Tiz yer, lad. Vower minutes late. Your stop’ll be fourth on, no more’n vifteen minutes.’

The man’s clumsy gentleness touched him. It was a long time since anyone had called him ‘lad’. It was another short step on the road to resurrection.

2

The flint road wound upward through immense patches of wild rhododendron, then down again to culverts that carried a swirl of storm-water from the moor, along with a sludge of brown, decaying twigs and dead leaves. There had been no one to meet him at the halt and no sign of a conveyance of any kind but he did not mind walking. It set forward the time of the interview by half an hour, the time he calculated it would take him to walk the two miles to the crossroads marked on the map enclosed with the letter confirming his interview. The crossroads was marked as Barton Cross and when he reached it he saw that the barn or barton marked a junction of four roads that were really no more than half-surfaced cart-tracks. He thought, ‘Now who the devil would build a school right out here? Nothing lives here but rabbits,’ but then, as at the station, his awakening senses told him the wilderness was teeming with life, every kind of life, and that there was promise here, in a month or two, of an immensity of colour and movement under the touch of April.

Already the hedgerows were starred with campion and primrose, with dog violets showing among the thistles and higher up, where the rhododendrons tailed off on the edge of a little birch wood, the green spires of bluebell were pushing through a sea of rusty bracken.

He calculated the gradient at about one in six and the road kept twisting towards a brown-green summit that was the open moor. And then, coming at last to a level stretch, he saw the grey line of buildings on the southern edge of the plateau, and the twin ribbons of leafless beeches lining the two drives. He paused at a ruined five-bar gate that lacked a hinge and bulged outward. Beyond it was a playing field and on the rugby pitch a game was going on between two fifteens wearing identical red and black jerseys. The cries of the players came to him faintly on the freshening breeze and he had a sense of renewal, seeing the little figures over there not as part of the present but of a time a million years ago, when he had played in the Grammar School fifteen, and had worn a jersey rather like that, save that the stripes were red and yellow. The moment passed and he pushed on, passing up the east drive to the forecourt and pausing in front of the three-storey Gothic building that reared itself there, grey, rather gaunt and incongruous in that setting.

The façade itself was long and flattish but outbuildings straggled all the way up the slight rise to a quadrangle he could glimpse beyond an arched doorway. He remembered then that the place had been built at a period when no commercially minded architect would dream of using any but a Gothic design, a time when the missionaries of Arnold of Rugby swarmed south, carrying the Doctor’s creed into every shire of the nation. You did not have to be told it was a school up there. It had, even at this distance, the smell of school, a compound of boiled greens, stale dust, steam-heat, spurned grass, sweat, socks and damp clothes. He moved along the forecourt until he came to an iron-studded door with a knocker fashioned in the shape of a dolphin. He raised the knocker, dropping it without resolution.

***

The Reverend Algernon Herries looked like an ageing, amiable clown. He had a cheerful, piping voice and a fruity bottle-nose, lined with a network of tiny veins and clothed, as though in crude jest, by a swathe of dark, curling hairs, that reminded David of the legs of an insect. White hair rose from the forehead in a clownish peak, giving a false idea of his stature that was short and thickset but still suggestive of agility and precise movement. His face was an actor’s face, that might have been seamed and burnished by years of makeup routine. The mobile eyebrows were clownish, too, tufted and pointed like the hair, but below them the eyes were of piercing blueness, the one feature of the face that belonged in a world of earnestness and shrewdness, eyes, David told himself, that would miss little and were there to keep watch over tolerant excesses that could go with a face like that. The man might look eccentric but that did not mean he was anybody’s fool. It therefore followed that he would not waste much time on an applicant lacking any kind of degree or experience, who had, moreover, the Twitch.

Yet the handshake was cordial, neither too firm nor too limp, and as he turned to lead the way down a stone corridor to his study he called, ‘Mr Powlett-Jones, Ellie! Bring tea, m’dear,’ and motioned his visitor into a room spilling over with books and dog-eared papers, indicating the one armchair beside the window, saying, ‘Sit you down. Ellie will be here with the tea in a jiffy. My apologies for your having to walk. We had a boneshaker until Christmas but then Stanbury, who drove it, took it into his head to do his bit and join the Army Service Corps. I do hope they don’t trust him with one of those heavy Thorneycrofts you chaps use. He’ll wreck it, for sure. He was always disputing passage with cromlechs and taking short cuts across patches of bog.’

David began to warm towards him. It was impossible not to, for his geniality was so genuine. But there was rather more to it than that. He was the first civilian David had ever heard inject irony into that phrase ‘do his bit’. For years now civilians had talked about ‘doing their bit’ as though they were on their way to church and wanted everybody to acknowledge their piety.

‘I…er…enjoyed the walk sir,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘The countryside…it’s much wilder than the country around Osborne…’ but then he stopped, biting his lip. He had been on the point of saying something bloody silly about the tortured Flanders landscape. Herries said, with unexpected gravity, ‘How long were you out, Mr Powlett-Jones?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three? Then you must have been under age when you enlisted.’

‘Only a week or two, sir. I went across with a Territorial draft in October. We were untrained but the regulars were badly hammered at First Ypres. I’ve been luckier than most.’

‘There’s no possibility of your returning?’

‘No, sir, I’m boarded.’ And then, with a touch of defiance, ‘I’d be no use to anyone out there now.’ He noticed dismally, that his hands had begun to shake.

Herries got up suddenly and at first David assumed the movement was an excuse to prevent him noticing the Twitch. It was not. He crossed the room and pointed to a fading sepia photograph hanging above one of the bookshelves. It was a very conventional photograph, fifteen lumpish youngsters, ranged in three rows, one lad squatting and nursing a ball.

‘There’s no need to feel isolated from us, least of all from me. That was our 1913 First Fifteen. Twelve are dead and one of the survivors is legless. We’ve lost eighty-seven to date, seventy-two of them known to me personally. My boys.’ He was silent a moment. Then, ‘On July 8th, 1916, I recorded eight names in one week’s casualty list. Does that help?’

It helped but it also embarrassed. Suddenly, inexplicably, David felt his throat constrict and whipped his right hand to his eye. For nearly a minute there was silence in the cluttered room. The bell saved him, saved them both perhaps. Its harsh, clanging note filled the room and then went jangling away to the north as the ringer, relishing his work, crossed the quad towards the longest of the redbrick outbuildings. Herries said, ‘That’s Shawe. Nobody is allowed to touch that bell but Nipper Shawe. He was the smallest boy in the school when he came here, so I had to find something to invest him with dignity. It worked, as you see. He now has the strut of the professional town-crier.’

A murmur reached them, swelling rapidly to a sustained clatter, as boys began to pass the window in twos and threes, boots scuffling, voices shrill and urgent. Herries pushed open the casement and hailed the nearest of them.

‘Who won, Daffy?’

A breathless boy paused under the window. ‘Nicolson’s, sir! Eleven–five.’

‘Eleven, you say? Great Scott! Outram’s were leading five–nil at half-time, weren’t they?’

‘Yes, sir, but Monkey scored a try early in the second half and Dodger converted. Then Hutchinson scored two more tries far out in the last five minutes!’

‘He did? Well, good for Hutch! That must have rattled Outram’s. Thank you, Daffy.’

The boy ran on, disappearing in a stream that was flowing through the arch of the western face of the quad. Away in the distance Nipper Shawe was still swinging his handbell. Herries settled himself, reluctantly, David thought, behind his littered desk.

The spate of nicknames, the obvious rapport between headmaster and boys puzzled him. In both his schools the headmaster had been a remote, austere figure. He had never heard either of them use a nickname, or address even a senior boy as a near-equal. His hands stopped shaking. He said, getting some kind of a grip on his nerves, ‘I’ve…er…no degree, sir. I was planning to go up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1914. I only agreed to this interview because the Osborne neurologist insisted. He has…er…some eccentric ideas on therapy.’

‘Really? Tell me.’

‘He said I could apply for a temporary post, and gain experience while the shortened ex-officers’ courses are being arranged at Varsity. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to teach. I’m certainly not equipped for the job.’

The tufted eyebrows came up. ‘Any other career in mind?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then I’d say the neurologist knows what he’s about.’

Herries got up again. Behind a desk he seemed unable to express himself with characteristic directness. ‘Look,’ he said, suddenly, ‘why don’t you give us a trial? As from now, and irrespective of whether that chap at Osborne is right or wrong? You’d be helping me no end. I’m stuck with a dozen tired men called out of retirement, and two C.3 trainees, rejected by the medicals twice over. Oh, they do what they can, but they come in for a lot of ragging. This overdose of jingoism we’ve had for so long, it’s rubbed off on the boys. You’d have a distinct advantage over the rest of us there. Three years at the Front. Twice wounded. It’s a flying start, man.’

‘I’m very far from fit, sir.’

‘You’ll get fit up here. Everybody does.’ He expanded his barrel chest and David thought briefly of Rugeley-Scott, and his insistence on the benefits of upland air. ‘Besides, we’d make allowances. History is your main subject, isn’t it?’

‘Modern history was to have been, sir.’

‘Could you make a stab at English in Lower School? Ground work? Introductory stuff? As I say, we’re in a rare pickle here. Every school is, of course, but out here, miles from the nearest town, we’re at the very end of the queue. Just how do you feel about hanging around Osborne until those shortened courses are set up, then going up for the minimum two years?’

‘Frankly the prospect terrified me, sir. It’s difficult to make the necessary effort when the only people you meet are crocks, as bad or worse than yourself. They tell me it’ll be much the same at Cambridge. Every man on those courses will be ex-service.’

‘You’re afraid of becoming institutionalised? Is that it?’

‘More or less. I had thought about signing away pension claims, discharging myself and going it alone somewhere.’

‘Anywhere particular?’

‘In the Welsh mountains. I had some good times up there when I was a boy but Rugeley-Scott insists…’

Herries flipped the cover of a buff file.

‘It’s only fair to tell you I had a lengthy letter from Mr Rugeley-Scott. He was very explicit. Would you care to see his letter?’

‘No, sir. I can guess what he said.’

‘The bit about an enclosed community?’

‘I know the clinical symptoms of severe shell-shock. I should do, after seven months in hospital.’

‘Let’s take it as read then. As to going into retreat, you could do that here if you cared to. Term ends in three weeks and you could stay around and nurse yourself for a month. It’s very quiet during the holidays. I could show you the country on horseback. We still have a couple of old screws the requisitioned left behind. Or you could walk solitary if you preferred it.’

For the first time since he had been fully aware of his situation David came to terms with his profound reluctance to go home to Pontnewydd. His mother, who had survived worse tragedies, would stay clear of him, but who else would in a close-knit mining community, where almost everyone knew him as ‘Davyboy’? What was necessary, what was absolutely essential in the next few months, was privacy. Privacy, within a community of people cut off from the reality of what was still happening over there.

‘Could you give me a moment to think it over, sir?’

‘I can give you all evening. No need to pound down that road for the five-thirty. Be our guest and sleep in the President’s Room – President of the Old Boys that is. We always keep a room for him, that’s his privilege. I can lend you pyjamas and we’ll root out a toothbrush, although I’m told they’re in short supply like everything else except eggs and bacon. We’re very privileged in that respect. We keep our own hens and pigs.’

He opened the door and stepped out, calling to his wife Ellie for the tea. David went over to the window that opened on the quad. Behind what looked like the changing rooms the light was dying. Through a screen of leafless elms bordering the playing field he could see the orange glow of a heatless sun. Sunsets belonged to his earlier life. In the trenches the sun always set behind the British sectors. There was some kind of bath-house over there and every now and again a towel-draped boy darted across a flagged court and disappeared into a cloud of steam. It was as much a masculine world as Flanders but the difference showed in the speed of the boys’ movements and their high spirits that reached him as half-heard sallies and short barks of laughter. Out there men still laughed but rarely in that way, rarely without bitterness. He thought, ‘It’s what I need, I daresay, but how the devil do I know I could stand up to it? If any one of those kids tried it on, as boys always do with a new man, I might go berserk. Or I might crumple up and pipe my eye, as I nearly did when Herries mentioned that 1913 First Fifteen…’

He braced himself to take a closer look at the photograph. The boys were his contemporaries, their average age about seventeen when that picture was taken. It was even possible to fancy he could recognise one or two of them, so typical were they of all the youngsters who went west in the bloody shambles in 1916. That was the day Robin Barnes copped it two yards from the trench. And Nick Austin, too, although Nick had taken a night and a day to die, too far out to be brought in by the stretcher-bearers. A whole generation gone and here was the next, flexing their muscles for the show, looking forward to it, he wouldn’t wonder. There was talk of a big Jerry offensive, with whole divisions released by the collapse of the Russian front. If things were desperate enough they might even come combing in places like this. Jerry already had. Two prisoners, brought in by trench raiders the night before he stopped the mortar blast, had been seventeen and looked much younger. He remembered them vividly, although he had never thought about them since, a pair of terrified starvelings in uniforms several sizes too big for them, their coal-scuttle helmets sitting on their shaven heads like extinguishers…Could anyone do anything about it at this stage? Suppose the war ended next year or the year after? Would there be anyone left to listen?

Herries and his wife came back together, the headmaster carrying a loaded tray. Mrs Herries was four inches taller than her husband and thin as a beanpole. Her eyes were as kind and shrewd as his and he thought, as Herries introduced them, ‘He’s holding on better than most and so is she…It must be a little like losing seventy-two sons…’ and the reflection helped him to make up his mind. He said, ‘Could I wire for my things, sir? Enough to tide me over?’ and Herries said, casually, ‘Better than that. We’ll telephone the hospital as soon as you’ve had a meal and a look round. Crumpets? Why not? There are certain compensations in being marooned, my dear chap.’

It was dusk in the quad when they went out. They had no electricity up here and a shuffling little man with buck teeth was lighting oil lamps suspended over the three arches and at intervals down the long, flagged corridor to the dining hall. David peeped in and made a rough calculation of numbers seated at tea. Four hundred, give or take a dozen. He followed Herries up two flights of slate steps to a landing giving access to two large dormitories, each sleeping about thirty boys. It seemed a very Spartan school. There were no floor coverings, apart from narrow strips of scuffed coconut matting, and no lockers beside the iron cots, each covered with a red blanket. Under each bed was a laundry basket and an enamel chamber-pot. It was very much like a barrack but some of the headmaster’s brusque geniality had rubbed off on the fabric, enough to make it threadbare-friendly, like an old and shabby rectory. Herries, reading his thoughts, said, ‘We’re not too well endowed and all the renovations we had in mind have been postponed for four years. The carpentry shop keeps us from disintegrating completely. Our numbers keep up, however, a third of them the sons of Old Boys. A few of their fathers were in Upper School when I came here.’

‘When was that, sir?’

‘Summer term, 1904. I always say I came in on the radical tide. It was a year or so before a Liberal landslide. You would have been a child of eight.’

‘I remember for all that,’ David said, smiling. ‘You can’t evade politics in the valleys. How did Bamfylde come to be built in a place as remote as this, sir?’

‘Everyone asks that. It grew from a school for farmers’ sons. About two dozen of them used to ride their ponies to a farmhouse a mile or so nearer the village. Most of the day boys still ride. One of Arnold’s disciples was rector here and talked the local people and county authorities into founding the place, in 1853. We’re a direct grant school, and about a third of our income comes from the Ministry. They leave us pretty much alone, however, and I get my way in most things. Lord Hopgood – this is part of the Hopgood estate – and the Old Boys make all the real decisions. After I’ve primed them, that is. Some of the Governors are Old Boys, others are local government bigwigs, a few of them local tradesmen in the area. I’ll give you some registers and a prospectus to lull you to sleep after dinner. Come on down now. We’ve just time to view the place from my thinking post before it’s dark!’ and he bounced down the stairs, into the passage, across the quad and through the arch leading to the changing rooms and bath-house, moving at a half-trot.

The red-brick block behind the school was shut and silent now. Herries, bustling ahead, pointed to a row of single-storey stone buildings. ‘Tuck-house, stables, junkroom, armoury – we have a very flourishing O.T.C. – and the fives court. Latrines opposite. Have to do something about them soon, war or no war. The only effective flushing we get is by moorland brook. Well enough this time of year, when it rains five days a week, but a problem in a dry spell. Take the left-hand path between those two elms. That’s the cricket pavilion and swimming bath. We had the devil’s own luck there. It was finished the week war broke out. Mind the roller – the chain-gang shouldn’t have left it there. Along under the hedge towards the plantation. I’ve seen that grow. Local wiseacres said trees couldn’t survive in the path of the north-easters but they did. We now have a windbreak I wouldn’t care to be without. Here’s the spot. My thinking post!’ and he stopped, giving David time to catch his breath. Herries heard him wheezing and was instantly apologetic. ‘I say, old chap, I’m sorry…simply never occurred to me…I trot everywhere. Most of us do up here, except in summer term. Have to keep the blood circulating. But I should have remembered, you’re still convalescent. Take a breather.’

Herries’s thinking post was the stump of an enormous beech, snapped off about twenty feet from the ground. He seemed to have a great affection for it and patted it as though it was a dog. ‘Getting on for three hundred years when it was struck by lightning, in 1912. Lucky job it happened in August, with no one about. Could have killed a dozen of us. Took the sawyers a month to cart it away but it’s still very much alive for me. I used to climb it as a boy.’

‘You were a boy at Bamfylde?’

‘Seventy-three to seventy-eight, but that was in Wesker’s time. Wesker was a brute. I’ve seen him flog a whole class for spelling mistakes in dictation. Damned fool thing to do. Lucky I could spell.’ He paused for a moment, looking down on the scatter of orange lights some two hundred yards below. The outline of the main buildings was just visible, a blue-black blur, quickened by the last pulse of the winter sun. ‘I very rarely flog a boy and then only for two offences. Persistent lying, and persistent bullying.’

David said, suddenly, ‘How do you see it, sir? Education, I mean, the real purpose of it? In all that time you must have formed some conclusions.’

In the dusk he saw the man smile as he stroked his thinking post.

‘How? Well, certainly not as a matter of hammering information into boys. That was the general idea when I was young, before Arnold’s ideas had time to flower. He was an insufferable prig, of course, and most of his disciples were worse, but they were moving in the right direction. The important thing is to adapt their theme to the twentieth century, before the commercials move in and take over. I don’t really regard myself as a schoolmaster, or not any longer. I’ve changed direction myself a good deal since I took charge here, particularly so in the last few years. I suppose I see myself as a kind of potter at the wheel but then, that’s priggish too, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Not the way you mean it.’

‘Ah, but how do I mean it, precisely? It isn’t easy to put these things on paper, or even convince yourself satisfactorily. Parents send their sons to a place like this for specific reasons. The main one is to get an education that will enable them to survive, I suppose. But once they settle in many other processes go to work. They learn a little tolerance, I hope, and how to see a joke against themselves, and how to stand on their own feet. But, above all, the knack of cooperating. I’m not too insistent on scholarship. Scholars are dull dogs for the most part. When I was a boy here there were no organised games to speak of. We crammed and then mooched about, devising ways of avoiding punishment, and tormenting one another out of sheer boredom.’

‘Isn’t that what everyone’s engaged in now, sir?’

‘Yes, it is. But there’s a well-defined end product, thank God.’

‘What is it, sir?’

‘A second chance. You’re a history man, so let me ask you a question. Granted my thinking post is three hundred years old, what was happening when it was a foot high?’

‘The Civil War was brewing.’

‘Precisely. And something very practical emerged from that. Parliamentary democracy for one thing. Two steps up, and one and a half down. That’s my view of history. British history, at all events.’

‘But we’ve fallen down a long flight since 1914, haven’t we?’

‘We’ve taken a tumble certainly, but that’s because we were too damned cocky in the first years of the new century. I daresay we’ll learn from it. Dammit, we have to unless all those youngsters were the victims of an obscene practical joke, and I can’t let myself believe that they were. As I say, I saw seventy-two of them grow up, and there weren’t many fools among them. And no cowards, either, not in the true sense of the word.’

The man’s optimism was working on him like a drug. His staying power, the strength and simplicity of his faith, was something the men out there had lost long ago, as long ago as Neuve Chapelle and Loos. But a flicker of doubt remained. He said, ‘As to learning from it, I take it you mean internationally? Out there everyone below the rank of field officer has had a bellyful of patriotism.’

‘Ah, patriotism,’ Herries said, affably, and although the dusk now shrouded them completely, David divined a twinkle in the eyes. ‘Don’t forget Edith Cavell, Powlett-Jones. Patriotism is not enough…She could have amplified that, poor soul. Patriotism is a first step, I’d say. On the road to civic maturity that is. You had three years out there. I still believe in a Divine Purpose. You survived for a purpose, I imagine. To help head other survivors in the right direction, maybe.’

Nipper Shawe was swinging his bell again. For prep probably, and its clamour terminated Herries’s reverie. ‘Come, we’ll look in on Big School and introduce you. It’ll break the ice for man and beast. Then dinner. Ellie has shepherd’s pie, with gooseberry fool to follow. We have fruit cages behind that copse and Ellie is a fanatical bottler.’

They moved down the slight incline towards the scatter of lights and at the end of the path David barked his shin on the fender of the horse-roller. ‘Curse that chain-gang,’ Herries said, genially, ‘I’ll have Masterson’s press-gang move it in the morning. Masterson is down for Dartmouth in September. He’s a natural leader of the press-gang.’

Two

1

Never in the past or indeed in the years ahead was he so sharply aware of that heightened sense of time that accompanies the process of self-discovery; of new faces, new experiences, new dimensions of space, shape, texture, colour and relationship that lifted him out of limbo and set his feet squarely upon virgin ground.

There was that farcical incident the first day he took the Lower Fourth, that final refuge of extravagant humorists, who regarded any new tutor, especially an inexperienced one, as legitimate prey, a blind and bumbling bear, to be baited and tested for sharpness of tooth and claw. From the first he saw the various groupings of the boys in terms of sections in a muster of infantry, halfway through his front-line service, a time when the ranks of any sizeable unit included battle-tried veterans, work-shy barrackroom lawyers and any number of nervous eighteen-year-olds, fresh from school and recruit centre, all eager to show their mettle.

The scale began in the Second Form, composed entirely of first and second termers, ticking off the days as they adjusted to the pangs of homesickness. One looked for no trouble at all with these. All that was necessary was to slip into the role of jovial uncle, or brother separated by a wide age gap, and jolly them along, spicing the lesson with a few old chestnuts and injecting the spice of romance into pages of the text-books where all the tedious milestones of British history were marked in heavy, marginal print, a row of cromlechs tracing a road across a waterless desert.

In the Lower, Middle and Upper Third sights had to be adjusted. Here were the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, who had played themselves in and were now in the process of separating into four streams, streams that he came to think of as the anxious-to-learners, the occasional-triers, the professional timepassers and the practical jokers, bent on making a reputation for themselves.

It was in the Fourth Forms that trouble really began. The Fourth Forms were the school watershed, boys of fifteen and above, with two or three years of rough and tumble behind them and no immediate responsibilities ahead, a majority of skrimshankers who reminded him of the crafty, time-serving men, whose experience earned them stripes one day that were taken away the next. And of the three Fourth Forms the Lower Fourth was the toughest, perhaps because the Cambridge examinations would be that much nearer after removes to the Middle and Upper Fourth were achieved, and pressures were applied by parents reacting to end-of-term reports.

At all events, his first crisis came on his second morning at Bamfylde, when he introduced himself to some thirty blank-faced fifteen-year-olds in Big School, used as a formroom for the Lower Fourth during the day and as a communal prep room for the whole of the Middle School in the evenings.

It was a difficult room to overlook. The space between the rostrum and the first row of desks was unusually wide, so that he had a sense of being detached from the class in a way that did not happen elsewhere. The ceiling was high and arched and the three Gothic windows gave a clear view of the forecourt and east drive, an open invitation to idlers to concentrate on comings and goings out there rather than on the blackboard or the rostrum.

Boyer, a well-grown, rather saturnine boy with dark hair and high cheekbones, occupied a desk in the back row and even before the incident David marked him down as a jester. He had humorous, heavy-lidded eyes, grey, watchful and mocking. From the moment of making his first appearance, however, David was struck by the unusual passivity of the class. They sat very sedately, attentively awaiting his opening gambits, so that he was well launched on a survey of Elizabeth’s foreign policy when there was a sudden stir at the back of the room. A glance, centring on Boyer, warned him he was in trouble, serious trouble if he let it get out of hand, for Boyer had turned very pale, blinking his humorous eyes rapidly as his limbs twitched and jerked, setting all the inkpots in the communal desk leaping in their sockets. Before David could make even the briefest assessment of the situation the mouth began to twitch in sympathy so that one had the distinct impression that Boyer was in the grip of some form of palpitation or spasm that would bring him, in a matter of seconds, to a point of prostration. David stood up and made a single step towards the edge of the rostrum but at once a forest of hands shot up and reassuring advice was shouted at him from all directions.

‘It’s all right, sir!’

‘Don’t worry, sir!’

‘Only one of Boyer’s fits, sir…!’

‘Shall I take him to Matron, sir?’ And then, calmly stated above the chorus by Dobson, Boyer’s right-hand neighbour, ‘It happens about once a week, sir! Fresh air always brings him round, sir. Shall I open the window and loosen his collar, sir?’

It was Dobson’s unceremonious handling of the boy that alerted him for, as he bent over Boyer to loosen his tie, he overplayed his hand by tightening it. Boyer, choking on the knot, came to for a fleeting second, long enough to push his outstretched hand into Dobson’s face with such force that Dobson reeled across the aisle until stopped by the water pipes. At the same time concern seemed to ebb from the boys crowding round and some of them began to titter, establishing beyond doubt that Boyer’s performance was very much appreciated.

He took a chance then. He had nothing but instinct to tell him that Boyer’s seizure was a well-rehearsed trick on the part of the Lower Fourth to relieve the tedium of an hour devoted to De Silva, Walsingham and the Dutch. He roared, at the top of his voice, ‘Silence! Places!’ and the command at least had the effect of dispersing the crowd about Boyer’s desk, giving him his first real chance to weigh the probabilities. Then Dobson rallied but again, a mere amateur alongside Boyer, he overplayed, saying, in an aggrieved voice, ‘I was only trying to help, sir…!’ and that did it. Colour returned to Boyer’s face and he sat upright, blinking and looking confused, a traveller who has awakened in a train to discover he has passed his station. And in a sense he had for David descending from the rostrum, and moving down the centre aisle, scented victory in the hush that fell in the class as he said, quietly but menacingly, ‘Stand up, Boyer! You too, Dobson!’, and both boys raised themselves, looking, David thought, surprised and vaguely apprehensive. He said, in the same level tone, ‘Quite a performance! But it needs working on, Boyer! You’re not bad but your partner is a terrible ham,’ and the astonished laugh, heavier and more sustained than the obligatory response to a master’s quip, set the seal on his triumph. He paused then, savouring it and wondering if either Boyer or Dobson would have the nerve to carry the bluff a stage further. When they did not he said, mildly, ‘It’s only fair to warn you I’m familiar with all forms of hysteria. In fact, I’m an expert, having spent the last seven months in shell-shock wards.’

It was well below the belt. He was aware of that but he didn’t care. It was a crossroads in his life, and victory was essential. In the uneasy silence that followed he weighed his words carefully, finally opting for a middle course, halfway between outrage and appeal, but choosing irony as the weapon best suited to the occasion.

‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘Boyer being happily restored to full health, suppose I begin by being frank? This is my second day here but I’ll add to that. It’s also my second day in the teaching profession – teaching in school, that is, for I’ve been engaged, among other things, in teaching recruits how to deal with the Opposition. Think about that, because the Opposition, from here on, is you. Right, sit down, both of you, and let’s have a show of hands. How many of you were in on Boyer’s little relapse?’

Four hands were raised. Then eight and finally two more, near the front. Their readiness to admit complicity touched him. He said, easily, ‘Well, that’s honest at all events. Boyer took the risks alone, so I don’t really see why he should be expected to carry all the bacon home. Everyone concerned, including Boyer and his male nurse, can copy out the chapter we were doing and bring it to me at morning break tomorrow. You deserve far worse, of course, but they tell me every dog is allowed one bite.’

The murmur told him all he wanted to know but Boyer still had a surprise for him. He stood up again, red in the face but resolute. ‘My…er…apologies, sir…It was only…a…well…sir…a…’

‘A tryout?’

‘Well, yes, sir. None of us knew, sir. About the hospital, I mean.’

‘No reason why you should.’ He lowered himself on the edge of the desk for a moment. At any minute he knew that his hands would begin to shake and the prospect terrified him. He said, carefully, ‘You’ve no exams this term, have you?’ and Youings, a studious-looking boy in the front row, said, ‘No, sir, not this term,’ and made it sound as if he regretted it.

‘Has anyone here ever tried teaching you more up-to-date history? The basic causes of the present war, for instance?’

‘A little, sir,’ from Youings, who continued, ‘Germany’s commercial jealousy, and need for overseas markets, sir?’ but then, to his surprise, Dobson’s hand shot up and he said, in response to a nod, ‘Kaiser Bill’s trying to rule the world, isn’t he, sir?’

‘According to the Daily Mail he is. Any other ideas?’

In their collective concentration he sensed a desperate eagerness to appease. Letherett, a red-headed boy, reminded the class of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke at Sarajevo. Gibson seemed to think it was all a bid on the part of Germany for naval supremacy. Hoxton was more subtle, stating categorically that Germany had gone to war in the belief that Britain would stand aside and let her occupy France. They were still having their say when the bell went and they seemed genuinely interested in his assessments of their answers. He said, by way of valediction, ‘We’ll continue the inquest on Friday if my reading of the timetable is correct. Class dismissed,’ and he gathered up his books and left without a backward glance.

***

It was different again with the Classical Fifth but perhaps not so different from his point of view, for here again he deliberately pushed himself out on a limb.

The Classical Fifth were beyond the skylarking stage. Some of them, a sizeable minority he would say, were genuinely interested in the subject, and he was luckier here, for they were preparing for summer exam questions on the late nineteenth century, as far as the death of Queen Victoria. It was easy to introduce them to the same theme, and be sure of their attention. He took the same line, stating the basic causes of the war and inviting questions. Foster Major’s question gave him his cue; Foster Major, six feet tall, and already sprouting golden hairs on his upper lip. He asked, eagerly, ‘How much longer will it take us to beat the Hun, sir?’

‘We can’t beat him now, Foster!’

The murmur that greeted this heresy dismayed him so he added, quickly, ‘Not in the real sense, not in the way we might have done if the Gallipoli show had been a success.’ He waited for that to sink in, then said, ‘Now we’ve no alternative but to crush him and don’t fool yourselves into believing that that is a final answer. It’ll buy us time but that’s about all. Jerry is bled white, but then, so are we. I don’t know what you fellows think of the Americans but I’ll tell you what the chaps think of them over there. Our one chance of avoiding a stalemate.’

They digested this. He could sense incredulity doing battle with other, less complicated reactions. Indignation, possibly, something that ran counter to everything they had been told over the years by men fighting the war from Fleet Street. Finally Gosse, a languid, smartly dressed boy, whose heavy horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a slightly aesthetic look, raised his hand. ‘Are you saying, sir, that we couldn’t beat the Hun without the Yanks – without the Americans, sir?’

‘I’m saying it would take us another two to three years, and that’s only another way of saying there wouldn’t be a victory. The object of war, as the men over there see it, is to preserve our way of life. That’s what they’ve been told and that’s what they believe, those of them that still believe in anything except each other. In three years there would be nothing worth preserving. One other thing, Gosse. Over there nobody uses the term Hun any more. I stopped using it at a place called St. Quentin. Two Germans carried me in a blanket across four hundred yards of open ground under a box barrage. If they hadn’t I wouldn’t be here arguing the toss with you.’

But Gosse, a diehard if ever there was one, stuck to his point.

‘I take it they were prisoners, sir?’

‘Yes, they were. But shell-splinters aren’t particular where they find a billet. They risked their lives to save mine.’

‘But in 1914 they burned Louvain, sir.’

‘Yes, they did. But I like to think they’ve learned since then. We’ve all learned something, or should have. If we haven’t, getting on for a hundred chaps who occupied those desks of yours a few years ago died in a circus, not a war.’

He hadn’t meant to say as much as this but later he was glad. For two reasons, separated by a few hours. In the first place, when the bell sounded marking the end of morning classes, they crowded round him, asking all kinds of questions, a few baffled and even hostile, but every one of them prompted by a burning curiosity. Then, as dusk was setting in, and he was closeted in what Herries called Mount Olympus – the ground-floor lavatory in the head’s house with its opaque window opening on to the covered part of the quad – he overheard Gosse and two other Fifth Formers discussing him. Dispassionately, as though they already accepted him as a queer fish. He made haste to get out then but before he could escape he heard one boy say, ‘All right, he’s a Bolshie. But what he says makes sense to me, Starchy!’

He was getting to grips with the Bamfylde obsession for nicknames. There were two Gosse boys at the school. The elder, a beefy extrovert, was called ‘Archibald’, so it followed that he should be labelled ‘Archy’ and his elegant brother ‘Starchy’. Starchy Gosse was a pedant but fair-minded, it seemed, for he said, mildly, ‘It depends on how long he’s been out there,’ and the third boy asked, ‘Why, Starchy?’

‘They say it gets a man down in the end. That chap talks just like my uncle Edward. He was invalided out two years ago, but my governor has stopped inviting him over. Seems to think he’s…well, almost pro-Hun…pro-Jerry. I don’t think he is. I mean, how the hell could he be, with one eye and one leg gone?’

David was sweating when he reached the stairs but in the privacy of his rooftop room, lent to him until he took up his quarters in Havelock’s House at the start of the summer term, he found he was able to take a more encouraging view of the conversation. At least Gosse had begun to think outside his prejudices. And at least doubt had begun to cloud the Classical Fifth’s conventional picture of the war, as drawn for them by Northcliffe and Bottomley. And also, as a bonus, Starchy had corrected himself when using the word ‘Hun’. Did it matter a damn if they thought of him as a Bolshie?

***

The Sixth Forms had to be handled very differently. In a way he equated them with the very youngest boys in the school, for they were exceptionally vulnerable at seventeen-plus. If the war dragged on for a few months, some of them would be out there and they were all too aware of it. The Rupert Brooke approach – Breast expanding to the ball – spent itself long ago, and disillusionment was general among all but the fanatics and armchair strategists. Sometimes it seemed to him that the foul blight had already touched these youngsters, so that he saw them stripped of their high spirits, leading some forlorn attack on a German sector, defended by heavy machine-guns, and belching mortar fire. They pressed him shyly for technical details, extensions